John Linton .....school holidays are always a 'dampening' influence but, even allowing for that, it was quieter than expected this 'week'. Perhaps the very poor business conditions in NSW, Queensland and Victoria are continuing to reduce business activities generally. Certainly in the UK the overall reduction of household expenditures is making an ever greater impact on an ever wider range of businesses and, from what I can make out of my reading of the French and German language financial news media the same is occurring in both those countries (particularly France. I was quite surprised how a week in France lifted my French reading comprehension and also vocabulary - though it did nothing about my atrocious French accent so I remained reluctant to attempt to vocalise it).
We did make some progress in moving on to the next stage of residential support and made good progress in developing the new control and reporting systems needed to ensure the new goal of resolving all customer problems within the first phone contact (with the exception of issues that need the involvement of the carrier). Our first few days of implementing this change are indicating that the starting point looks like being that a little over 50% of all support calls can be resolved within about 8 minutes. This indication is very rough and will be refined over the balance of October as the support managers and supervisors in Colombo get a better 'handle' on the call statistics and become more aware of the issues that need to be addressed. However we have made a start and every complex objective ever attempted requires that first step. It will be interesting to see how successful we can become in resolving 100% of support issues (that don't require carrier actions) within the first call....and how long, on average, that call becomes.
We also reached some conclusions about how/if we should provide mobile telephone services to our current customers and to possible new customers over the coming year. For twelve months we have been trying to find ways of providing mobile telephone services to our current customers. A big decision in that program was moving from Vodafone (our supplier for the first seven years of our existence) to Optus and then going through the process of 'migrating' some 5,000 customers from Vodafone to Optus. Over a twelve month period we managed to migrate the majority of the Vodafone users to our new Optus plans and in the process more than double the total number of Exetel ADSL users who also used Exetel as a mobile supplier. On the surface a relatively successful 'program' - apart from one minor thing - the business is only profitable because Optus pays such large 'commissions'. That is not a sustainable way of operating a business and it makes no sense to only obtain customers by showering them with Optus' money. So we will end the far too generous Optus promotion program and replace it with something that makes financial common sense.
Clarissa and Clare go to Colombo on Sunday to begin a two week training school for 16 out bound sales reps to begin the transition from selling small business services to medium business services. They have trained the first four Colombo based reps by bringing them to Sydney two at a time and will now accelerate this training program by teaching more people at a time as well as ensuring that the training previously done in North Sydney is working out as planned. Assuming this program continues to be successful we will reach our 'establishment' objectives of having a 64 person business sales force before the end on the 2012 calendar year - assuming that we continue to be successful with this three year program....there are many, many obstacles along this complex path.
So, as with most 'four day weeks', they are over before they have begun.
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